Isn’t it to get the air bubbles out? (NO!) And wedging is one of those zen practices that supposedly take 3 years to learn to do right?

Or, is it, in my experience, to get an internal coil going in your clay so that when you are throwing and you start to center on the wheel, your clay doesn’t fight you and centers up easily?

Why we wedge is something many potters know or have known throughout time but is still something I think should be discussed again; especially for art educators out there.

For years and years – and still! I have wedged “Japanese style”; spiral wedging (pointy end under my left hand, right hand on the fat- butt-end) with the spiral – at the fat end of my clay- running counterclockwise. That is, if you looked down on the fat end and imagined the spiral turning, it would spin into the center going counterclockwise.

Yes, I painted on the clay to try to show the spiral direction- which is counter clockwise when the fat end is pointing up- but when you put it on the wheel- it’s going clockwise!

Then I plopped that fat end of the clay down on my wheel-head and proceeded to throw American style with the wheel running counterclockwise (and the internal spiral going against that- clockwise) and I would very frequently have to battle my clay a bit to get it centered.

So often,– and especially after I got really consistent and more skilled at throwing– I noticed my clay would just refuse to totally center. It would get this little blip- a wobble, a part that seemed like it simply refused to settle down and let me get the clay all-the-way centered and I knew I was doing everything else right. Even if I coned it up and then brought it down just right, there would be that little blip again that I would end up trying to work around. Or, after I got the walls pulled, I would wonder why my pot would suddenly get some sort of odd wobble in it for no apparent reason.

Why did my un-wedged smaller lumps of clay behave so much better? For a while I gave up wedging anything that came straight out of the bag but for large pieces, it was pretty tiring getting it centered.

Finally, overhearing another teacher at Lill Street mention offhandedly something about the spiral helping to center the clay and, at some other point, after beating my clay into submission yet again and feeling like I was not going to always be this strong, a careful examination of the direction of my coil came the realization that the way I wedge was Japanese (the wheels in Japan go clockwise) but my throwing is western ((American wheels spin counter clockwise)

And it takes a fair amount of visualizing to figure out which way the internal coil in the clay is going once you’ve popped it onto the wheel. The fact of the matter is, it was pointless to wedge my de-aired, pugged clay if I was going to put the internal coil going against the spin of my wheel!

note!!!!

I don’t know how many countless people, students, educators, etc, have asked me, “don’t we need to wedge the clay to get the air bubbles out?” The answer is an emphatic NO!

Air bubbles in and of themselves are not a problem! It’s only the moisture* they hold that cause explosions. If something is properly dried, you will rarely have explosions.

So please don’t waste your time or your students’ creative-time wedging clay that has been already de-aired in a pugger- i.e. any commercially made clay- clay you would buy in a box.

In fact, improper wedging will more often add bubbles and you’ll just dry out your clay in the process.

Simply make sure the pieces get enough drying time and have no plaster mixed in with the clay- that IS a sure recipe for explosions.

So why DO we wedge?

When it’s for throwing**, it’s for getting an internal coil in the clay so it’s easier to center the clay. I do not wedge anything under 2-3 lbs if it comes straight out of the bag,I save that effort of wedging in an internal coil for larger pieces of clay when I would be wrestling to get a piece centered.

Here’s how I currently work: any clay straight out of the bag under 2.5 lbs doesn’t get wedged.

It’s airless and too small to matter. 2.5 -3 lbs get wedged the “new way” trying to train my poor hands to reverse their roles and anything over 3.5 lbs is wedged the “old way” and then flipped over.

Did I find it easier once I flipped my wedged clay upside-down onto the narrow point but with the internal coil now “tightening” when my wheel head went around?……Immensely.

All those old problems disappeared and it was much easier to center. Just recently I forgot to flip a wedged piece, began to center it, felt the blip and realized what I’d done and so I actually cut it off the wheel and turned it over and then it was just fine. What a great illustration of what I’d been learning.

And yes, I mentally slapped my forehead for not figuring this all out years earlier!

Oh well, better late than never and since I didn’t figure it out for so long, I thought I’d share what, in retrospect, seems like an obvious fact with all you out there who may have also missed it.

*Why is moisture a problem? Once the clay hits the temperature of water boiling, any water will, in fact, boil and turn into rapidly expanding gas which has no space to expand. The result? An explosion as the gas pushes the clay “out of its way”.

**There are just a few uses for wedging when you hand-build. Chiefly it would be to “even out” clay that had been stored a long time- say one side is a bit drier than the other. When I hand-build I use it to make sure my slabs shrink back evenly in all directions- but just take a look at my blog entry on throwing a slab vs. slab rollers for an explanation of that.

***

And while I’m on the topic of de-aired clay, I had a batch of reclaim that I took to a friend’s house and used their Soldner mixer to get it back in shape. I ended up with 300lbs of porcelain filled with micro-bubbles. I slam-wedged it quite a bit but I could never get out all the millions of tiny bubbles so I tried throwing with it. It was very interesting! I could throw a lot taller with it, The clay was stiffer and a bit shorter. “Shorter” in clay terms means that it is less plastic, it won’t stretch as much. Clay is always a balance between wonderful elasticity and not having floppy collapsing clay. In porcelain, I feel that line is even more delicate.

It was great to make a lot of tall and large things out of grolleg porcelain and I simply avoided pulling handles from it or bringing down wide rims or even making a pitcher spout with that particular clay. I used my regular clay to make handles and they fit the mugs I threw just fine. My other concern was a lumpy surface and I did 2 things; I ignored it and the bubbles seemed to flatten out in the firings and I also took a serrated rib and ran it over the whole surface while I was throwing and then smoothed it again. Neither method was perfect but I used up (and sold the end products) of all 300 lbs.

When I discussed this batch of clay with my friends who had lent the mixer, he had also mixed a batch of porcelain with similar results, a stiffer clay. He quoted a old potter who said “pugging ruined clay”

This is one of those posts where I would very much welcome comments from potters who will know more about this than I do.

For directions and more information click on the 57th Street Art Fair link below:

The 57th Street Art Fairis a two-day outdoor celebration of the visual arts held in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, adjacent to the University of Chicago campus and the home of President Barack Obama.

Just a few of the women potters of Northfield were able to gather at Kip O’Krongly’s studio this past week to watch her demonstrate how she makes her wonderful handbuilt terra cotta plates.

My first caveat in this tutorial is that Kip works with Terra Cotta and additionally, it is a custom recipe of hers. That said, I do believe most any Terra Cotta will work and possibly stoneware. What I’m really not sure about is if you could do this with porcelain! Those higher fired clays tend to get a little slumpy at cone 10. I plan to try this in the spring and will post results (eventually!)

What you will need:

A file folder or other heavyish card stock for templates

Cutting tool like this or a needle tool

Rolling pin and 2 ¼ “ thick sticks or a rolling pin like Kip has with rubber washers that set the depth or maybe a slab roller

And an extruder that looks like a calking gun. I’m sure you could try the whole thing out with just a coil but if you were going into production, you’d probably like to have the extruder.

Banding wheel(s)

Scoring tool

Water

Yellow rib

A beveling tool with a rubber tip

Here we go:

Kip took about a pound of clay and began to roll it out with her special rolling pin- I think she said she got this from a kitchen supply store- it comes with various sized removable rings- what a great clay tool, right? (*If you Google “Fondant rolling pin” you can find them for sale in many places)

She had a tip for rolling it out- just roll up to near the edge – not over the edge and then work that lump outwards until it rolls under and becomes the edge.

Lay your plate template down- she made hers from a file folder and laminated them. Her template for dessert plate fit right inside her dinner plate template!They will eventually wear out.

Cut around the outside edge, lightly trace the inside circle.

Because Kip makes about 10- or 20 of these at a time there are points at which she makes a bunch and lets them sit. This would be one of those points- she would cut out quite a few of these and let them sit until she was ready for the next step… which is

Extruding the foot. This is her extruder and templates.

Kip has used old credit cards or 2 thicknesses of yogurt container tops to make her templates but she finally had these made. This is the one for the foot.

They are beveled to enhance the compression. She has marks on her table for the lengths she needs for the various sized plates she makes. So smart!

If she is doing a lot of these, she will immediately wrap each one in plastic. It’s a lot of surface exposed and it can dry up fast plus it needs to be flexible!

She curves her extrusion a bit while she is scoring the plate bottom along that line she traced earlier all the while, dipping her scoring tool in water. She then scores the extrusion and begins attaching it. When she reaches the end, she does not leave an overlap.

She scores the ends and butts them together, compressing and smoothing with her finger. She presses the foot on very gently with her finger while turning the banding wheel.

Now she will pay attention to finishing the attachment area. First she brushes it with a damp paintbrush and

then uses this tool

to go in on the outside to clean it up and compress it

and on the inside and make a bevel that will aid later in curving the plate.

This is another stopping point. These flat plates will be set on top of plastic and let dry to leather hard. If Kip is making a dinner sized plate, she would have set it on a bat instead of directly onto the banding wheel but the dessert plates are small enough to lift fairly easily.

Once the plate has set up, Kip works again on the banding wheel and in front of a mirror.

The mirror is invaluable in helping her see the rim and plate and keeping it even as she gently curves it,

she goes around the rim pinching and thinning it out toward the rim.

She also pushes down the center gently with a yellow rib. If you want a more dramatic dip and differentiation between rim and plate, you can really go in there and push down.

She cleans up the rim with a sureform type file and angles it slightly in. She also scores it with her pronged scoring tool.

Then it is time to extrude the rim.

She immediately coils this up to make sure it doesn’t crack later. She sets this piece on a smaller banding wheel next to the banding wheel with a plate on it.

The rim of the plate is wet-scored and then the rim is wet scored with a ridged rib all at once.

Kip then attaches the rim.

This time she does leave a slight overlap but she abuts the pieces and then compressing, and working it along, she moves that part of the rim in and attaches it. This is to keep the rim from cracking- it has to do with attatching a slightly wetter piece to the leather hard- at this point the rim will shrink more than the plate body.

She goes around the rim now; first with a damp brush, then a wooden tool and then the beveling tool which she uses to make a line. This makes the application of her latex easier and she fills it in later with slip- the latex keeping the rim clean and bare.

On the underside, the rim must also be smoothed and beveled and then a crack that inevitably forms when the curving is done must be addressed. A wooden tool and then finger do the job. and the beveling tool is used again.

Another natural stopping point, the plates could be wrapped for days until kip is ready to latex them. I will do a second post talking about Kip’s decorating process.

For now, you are left with a super lightweight plate that looks thrown!

I have been a huge fan of the Mata Ortiz pottery ever since I learned of it through a children’s book quite a few years ago. It’s mentioned in my earlier post about Mata Ortiz where I write a bit more about the story of this small town in Mexico; I received some pots for my birthday one year I enthusiastically wrote a post about it.

So, when an opportunity to attend a workshop taught by Eli Navarette was offered at the Northern Clay Center, I was thrilled to attend.

Some finished pieces by Eli Navarette

Eli was a really nice guy, open, knowledgeable and helpful. He taught the class in Spanish with a translator. My Spanish was good enough to understand him, ask questions and help translate occasionally.

He started out with a plaster “puki” which is a bowl-like mold that really helps hold the pot’s bottom shape. He made a large, fat “tortilla” out of his own clay, which he brought from the Mata Ortiz area.

While he did that, he passed around the clay which was very different in feeling from the clays I am used to working with here. It was very plastic and yet, somehow drier and also very strong. He said he mixed 3 types of clay together- his own recipe- one for weight, one for strength and one for plasticity. It was a very effective clay for the kind of handbuilding he was doing. He explained how he and other potters get all the clay from that area and how they prepare it. Basically , they dig it up, mix it with water in a 5 gallon bucket and let the heavy particles and stones and other things fall to the bottom. The excess water rises to the top which they pour off and take out the middle part to use.

They also get all their colorants from that area. More on that later.

After he had pinched the fat pancake up into quite a large part of the pot – and it was not thick! -he added a coil.

I was amazed because I though he would have to let that bottom part set up for a quite a while until it could support the weight and the action of adding another coil.

But I was wrong, the clay, under the skilled hands of Eli, had no problem supporting the next coil. After adding that coil he smoothed the inside with a blue rubber rib and scraped the exterior with a piece of hacksaw.

thencut the rim off to be even again for the next coil.

Then another coil

and voila! a really sizeable pot all in a very short time.

While he was working he chatted about how he came to be a potter.

His grandparents were living and working in Mata Ortiz but he was living in Chihuahua (the city) he can remember since he was about 7 years old seeing them working with clay but it wasn’t until a visit there when he was 22 and had already trained as an electrician that he decided he could and wanted to make pottery. It took him about 3 years to learn how to do it and now he lives with his wife (also a potter) and 2 children in Casas Grandes about 15 minutes from Mata Ortiz- if you take the new road. Both his brothers are potters, the youngest having started doing it first. He said there are now 3 generations of potters, 600 in all! They’ve been making the pottery there for 50 years. And there are young kids already learning about and working in pottery -that would be the 4th generation.

Next up was decorating the pots. He told us he sands the bone-dry pots with 3 grades of sandpaper, ending with the finest grade. I asked him about what precautions he takes to avoid breathing in the dust, a health hazard, and he said he works outside and/or wears a mask.

He then takes manganese mixed with clay- so, technically a slip, not an oxide- and applies it to the entire surface using a scrap of velvet. He said if you don’t mix the manganese with clay it doesn’t “stick” to the surface. Then after that had dried- a matter of a minute or so, he applied a solution to help with the burnishing.

His recipe for this burnishing solution was very interesting. He puts 5% finely ground Graphite and 5% baby oil into kerosene (90%) and applies that with his hand over the black manganese slip. There was some discussion about using just baby oil or baby oil and graphite and also soap- both of those work but leave considerably more streaks.

Then he takes an agate, highly polished –sometimes they sand them- but this looked like it was out of a rock tumbler and he said they used that too and begain to burnish.

Immediately the surface was a brilliantly shiny black.He said he puts 3 layers on burnishing each layer and by the 3rd coat is wearing cotton gloves so as not to put any oils from his hands onto the surface. You can see how reflective it is in the photos. You can also see that there are some streaks- that is why he does 3 layers.

Next he revealed (from under a cloth) a piece he was working on. He apologized that the black surface was only 2 coats and began to paint some lines with a brush that looked like just a few hairs but quite long. he painted on very fine lines. Here are his brushes!

He brought small amounts of his colors with him; white, orange and red in addition to the black. These are also slips because they are colored clays.

Despite being so shiny, the surface is still absorbent. After he has put on the lines he goes back in with a much shorter brush and fills in We all gathered around him to watch him paint, it was mesmerizing.

He told us it takes 3 days to make, dry and sand a pot, 3 days of polishing and at least 3 days to decorate the surface. I think the polishing days are not 8 hours of continuous polishing (though I could be wrong) but that each coat is applied, polished and left to dry. He was very clear about the surface decoration, 1 full day to paint on the lines- with just a few breaks for eating, stretching, etc. another day to fill in all the spaces and a 3rd day for corrections- that is where he takes a rounded tipped stick and gently rubs off lines that are mistakes.

So each pot is a considerable investment of time.

Then we made our own brushes! He had just a little hair for us to use but we were very lucky in that one of our participants was willing and generously allowed some of her beautiful straight hair to be snipped off and distributed.

Here is how you can make your own brush (and I’m sorry I didn’t take more photos- I was making brushes!) take a stick, like a small dowel or a fat skewer and sharpen it to a point. Cut a straight groove running out to the point to lay the hair in. The hair –which should be about 2” long at least can be dipped in water as often as you need to make it stick together! Lay it in the groove, overlapping the stick about an inch and wrap sewing thread tightly around it, binding the hair to the stick. Leave out a bit of thread sticking out to tie a knot when you are done. When you get to the tip, do one loop just around the hair to keep it together and then wind back down around the stick, now laying the thread right next to itself, covering the stick end completely. When you get back to where you started and left that thread sticking out, tie a knot. You can use nail polish or epoxy to seal the thread and hold it in place. We used roughly about a yard of thread.

We all made at least one brush and used them on tiles to practice some of the techniques he showed us. I will add a photo of my tile when I get it back.

Lastly we talked about firing and how he fires and how the Mata Ortiz potters used to fire.

In the early days, they would be out in the street and set their pot on an already fired cylinder then cover the pot with something like a large ceramic flower pot or a metal garbage can or something that just fit over the pot to protect it from the fuel. Then they would stack wood all around it, completely surrounding the makeshift saggar and on top of it and light it up. They managed to generate enough heat this way to get the pot hot enough to undergo what is called Crystal Inversion which is when the clay permanently changes and is unaffected by immersion in water any longer. Before crystal inversion, a pot can be recycled and turned back into a lump of clay just by getting it wet.

I confess it was not clear to me whether Eli currently uses gas to fire his pots or an electric kiln. What was abundantly clear was how amazing his clay was in that it could be heated up quite rapidly and cooled incredibly fast. He had a pot (which I now own!) made by his wife (who was ill that day and could not teach with him) that we popped into an already warm kiln. The kiln was taken up to 750 degrees centigrade (that’s Cone 012- 1382 Farenheit), left at that temp for about 15 minutes and then cooled within an hour and a half to where we could handle it!We took it out of the kiln when it was at about 450 and stuck it in front of a fan! The pot was fired in about 3 hours! Nothing exploded or cracked or showed any signs of stress at all! Interestingly, the colors were dull when we pulled out the hot potbut they brightened as the pot cooled.

I think what I love about the Mata Ortiz potters – besides their spectacularly beautiful pottery is that they are working much as their ancestors did. They use simple methods that they discovered themselves. They are always trying new things and sharing knowledge. They work completely locally, using the materials at hand and in doing this, they have dramatically raised the standard of living in their area!

Now celebrating its 34th year, Fountain Square Art Festival is the largest and oldest fine arts fair on Chicago’s majestic North Shore. Featuring the eclectic works of more than 225 juried artists, this sprawling art showcase epitomizes words like “cosmopolitan” and “sophistication.”

The festival takes place in downtown Evanston, just steps from the eponymous Fountain Square. It also features a popular children’s art tent with fun activities overseen by the acclaimed Evanston Art Center, food, and a soothing jazz-centric music lineup.

These “Fossil Pavers” are so named because you are inlaying the lighter clay into the larger Terra Cotta paver body. This is a fun and useful project for all ages and can be a lasting decoration for your garden or house (provided you have access to a kiln!)

I taught this class a few years ago at Lill Street and again recently at the Northern Clay Center.

At Lill we did it as a family workshop and what is great about this project is children as young as 3 or 4 can help lay out the design. You’ll need something round to trace- about 12″ across.

We used 2 kinds of clay. Continental Clay’s Terra Cotta will fire nicely to Cone 1 which is what we did so that the pavers would be essentially non-porous for wintering outside and also extremely dense for the strength needed to be able to step on the pavers.

Start with your light colored clay (porcelain, light stoneware or raku clay) and make your design. Make it as fine as possible as it will spread out when you flatten the terra cotta over it. When rolling coils, if they are drying and consequently cracking, roll them on a little patch of dampened table- a canvas covered table is ideal. If you are cutting out leaf shapes, make the clay as thin as you reasonably can- that means less than 3/16th of an inch! More like an 8th of an inch or less. The reason for this is so that your paver won’t be lumpy and the white clay not fully integrated into the surface of the paver. These leaves are a little too thick and caused a bit of trouble getting them to fully integrate.

Lay out your design on a piece of board or paper! We found it helpful to draw the pattern on a piece of paper and to trace our circles so that we knew the boundaries of the paver and could lay out the design well within it.

***IMPORTANT NOTE!*** Words must be laid out in mirror writing. This may seem really hard but you can lay out the word and then simply flip it over. You can see we have the world “Welcome” backwards here.

Also important to keep your white clay pattern moist- spritz it before you set it aside and again before you put the terra cotta over it. Make sure it does NOT sit in water! That will make it too soft and it will smear.

And before you throw a slab and shake the table, MOVE your layout! Several layouts were shaken to bits before we caught on!

Next, throw a thick terra cotta slab and then roll it to about a ½ inch thickness. You can do this using two half-inch thick boards on either side of your slab. You will need a long rolling pin though! We needed about 7-8 lbs of clay to make a 12 “ circle.

Before your lay your finished and smoothed terra cotta slab over your design, wipe the surface with a sponge and spritz your design.

Then starting at one edge, lay your slab carefully down over your design and using the flat of your hand pat/smack it down firmly over your design. You can also go over it gently, firmly and evenly with the rolling pin. It’s okay if it gets thinner than ½ an inch- but not too much!

It is important to lay the slab over the design instead of vice versa to give you a very uniform flat surface where the clay pushes down to the level of the light clay’s design.

Now you can flip it over by sandwiching it between 2 boards or simply picking it up and flipping it over.

If your design is still sticking up, you can gently go over it from the front with a rolling pin too.

After that, lay your circle pattern over the slab, covering your design and cut around it. Go over the edge with an dampened sponge to soften the corner and get rid of sharp chip-able edges.

Let dry thoroughly and fire to Cone 1!Here is my fired fern paver example from Lill. I was working very fast to make the example as I had young kids waiting to work! I’ve had it for years now, left outside in the winter many times and it’s still intact!

This is just a quick tutorial on how to make a “Faux Bois” (fake wood) texture on a slab.

It is my impression that Faux Bois is all the rage and if Martha Stewart has Faux Bois wrapping paper, clearly, to be able to make a dish or box using it, it’s a GOOD THING™

It is also a good thing to do all the steps and do them in the right order.

Start with a slab that is about 1 inch thick.

Paint some slip on there or even underglaze in a fairly thick coat. I’m using chartreuse to make it particularly hard to see in my photos.

Take sheets of newspaper to “dry” the slip. Just lay the newspaper on there and watch as the moisture begins to show through the paper. When you pull up the first sheet, you may end up pulling off some of the slip-

just set that piece aside and keep drying with successive pieces of newspaper until there is no moisture being absorbed by the paper.

Here, I’m rubbing the paper down to aid in the moisture absorption.

At this point, if you wish, you can try to re-apply the peeled up slip. If you can get it to stick down to your now dryish surface, you may have to dry off the new bits with one more sheet of newspaper.

You are wondering why we need to “dry” the slip? We are going to stretch the slab under it. If the slip is wet, it will just stretch nicely with the slab and we won’t get any of the cool effects we’re trying for.

When your surface is not tacky or shiny, take a sharp tool like a needle tool and draw in the wood pattern. Basically you draw a few knotholes and then draw vertical lines that bend around them when they encounter the curve of the knothole. Take a look at some wood grains or Faux Bois wrapping paper for reference.

Don’t go too deep! You only want to pierce that dried slip layer. Also, draw it smaller and closer together because this pattern is going to

e x p a n d .

Next, begin to throw out a slab. This is a little tricky as you shouldn’t hold the slab on top and you can’t flip it over, you have to throw it with the slip side facing up the whole time.- my action shot of this did not turn out.

As it stretches, the faux bois pattern will become spread out and more proportionate.

I’ve found that if it has really sharp edges, once it is all the way thrown out, you can go over it gently with a rolling pin but I would avoid that if you can.

Then you can let it harden to leather hard and build something with it like a box, or you can drop it into a mold and make a dish.

Obviously you are going to need a transparent type glaze on it like clear or a celadone or even a shino depending on how dark your slip or underglaze is.

Everyone is so supportive of each other and I like being with all of them; so when I noticed that our farm cats here were leaving squirrel tails lying around their feeding area (yes, our cats are better at actually catching squirrels than our enthusiastic but clueless dog), I asked Barbara Zaveruha if she would teach a brush-making workshop. My favorite liner brush is starting to wear out and I suspect it is made of squirrel hair or something similar.

Brushes Barbara has made.

My local women potter friends were invited and we convened in my studio one morning bearing various roadside finds and fur bits

to be converted into brushes for slip and wax.

I have a list of what you will need at the bottom of this post.

Step one is laying out the hair/fur. Set out a straight-edge of some sort and line your hairs up against it in a pretty thin layer.

Then begin at the end and pretend that the hairs are like a mat and roll them up. The first hairs in line will end up at the center of your brush. Those will be the tip.

Once you get a good shape, hold your bundle firmly and have someone (another good reason to make this a communal activity) wrap and then tie some dental floss around it where you want your brush to end. This may be the middle of the bundle or closer to one end. Don’t worry how long the excess is, it will be trimmed later. Try to wrap a bit of a band.

What we discovered: coarse hairs should not be tied super-tight. Finer hairs like fox and squirrel hairs can be tied tightly, this does not deform the tip of the brush- but deer hair is much coarser and -my suspicions confirmed from some cursory research on the web– hollow. Which means the tighter we tied the wrap around it, the more it compressed and splayed outward giving us these frustrating multiple-tips results.

It suddenly came to me that we should try to tie it looser and Barbara assured us that later gluing would keep the hairs in place. A gently tightened but not tightly pulled wrapping yielded the first decent deer hair tip.

Notes on what hair to use from where: Barbara was using deer tail. Colleen had some deer fur also; possibly from the belly or hindquarters? Not sure.**

I took the longest hair I could find on our poor fox carcass and it was in the area behind the head, between the shoulders. This will work too, even if your only hair source is your (living) dog – apparently the Japanese prefer Akita hair for their best brushes so go ahead and call Fido over.

The fur/hair should have some kink or wave to it to hold the slip/wax/underglaze.

I don’t think curly coated dog’s hair will work nor the super-straight hair of say, a lab or pit bull (not long enough anyhow). I used the tip of a squirrel tail first and then the side hairs of the tail too- it all seemed to make a nice liner tip. Also, the finer hairs are probably best for smaller brushes and those larger thicker hairs better for big brushes.

Eventually we ran out of time, went in to eat soup and home-made bread (made by my talented husband) and scheduled a second workshop to finish the brushes. We all went off to boil our brush tips so they would be dry enough to clip and glue. This is a VERY IMPORTANT STEP because you don’t want your brush to reek after it has sat in water or worse, rot.

**********

We reconvened on a snowy morning with boiled tips in hand and proceeded to finish the brushes.

The boiling loosened the wrappings a bit so I ended up re-wrapping all the the ends and what I found worked best was about a ½ inch of wrapping to make the base of the brush a solid cylinder.

Barbara showed me a terrific type of knot. Before you start wrapping, you run a loop up that lays along the area you are going to wrap and just past it. Then you proceed to wrap over the loop. When you get to the end of where you are wrapping, poke the string (or floss in our case) through the loop leaving a bit of looseness and pull on the other end of the loop- the end that is sticking out of the bottom of the wrapping where you started-pulling on it will pull the loop and other end of string under the wrapping; pull until it is about halfway down the wrapping and then cut off both ends.

Next we trimmed non-tip end of the fur to a very blunt end and then dabbed that end straight down onto a blob of glue and worked the glue up into the hairs. Sometimes we needed a second blob depending on how absorbent the hairs were. To compress the sides in- prevent flaring, we wrapped the end in tape but I did not tape 2 of the ends and that seemed to work too. You will have to judge which ends need the tape.

I had scrounged some bamboo pieces from our shed- formerly used to hold up plants. You can buy bamboo in varying thicknesses at garden supply stores . The narrow (usually green) I will use for my tiny liner tips and my two Fox brushes will go in thicker shafts.

Next you will have to drill out the right diameter in the bamboo. Look at the diameter of the bottom end of your brush tip and judge what thickness bit you need for your drill. It’s better to err on the side of too-small. As Barbara said, “you can always make it bigger.”

Where I chose to cut the bamboo shafts had to do with the “joint”. I wanted to have a good ¾ of an inch above the bamboo “joint” which provides a “floor” for the glue and brush tip to rest on.

The inside of the bamboo is soft and the joint floor is harder so your drill should sort of stop at the floor and if you don’t push really hard, you won’t go through it.

Barbara is holding the bamboo just below the “joint”.

Next try out your brush tip in the hole before you put glue in there! You may want to drill it out larger. Note: if your wrapping is nice and flat and not lumpy, you should be able to fit it inside the opening in the bamboo shaft. That’s why, when you are wrapping it, you want it to be tight and flat and very cylinder-like.Note how different the end looks from when we first tied the bundles.

Once you can just squeeze the tip in, with possible help from the fettling knife to tuck a few stray hairs in remove it and put a decent sized drop of glue in there.

Re-insert your brush tip. Let dry and VOILA! You have a nice brush!

What you will need to make brushes:

Fur with some waviness or kink to it but not curly hair. Squirrel, raccoon, deer or canine fur (fox, dog) is ideal.

A straight edge of some sort.

Dental floss or waxed string

Water resistant glue- we used Duco, 5-minute epoxy would work too.

Hair clippers are very helpful

Fine saw

Bamboo (from the garden store)

A vice is very helpful

Drill and variety of sized bits

Paper plate for the glue (our glue started to dissolve a styrofoam tray I had)

Fine scissors

Tweezers can be helpful

Fettling knife

Needle tool

Toothpicks for the glue

Tape

** The best information I found on hair were fly-tying sites and blogs! I wish we’d read this excerpt before we started!:

“For example, the body of a deer has hollow hair, the tail is solid hair. The body hair of a calf is solid. Tails of all animals, like squirrel, woodchuck, calf, are typically solid. Solid hair typically is used for wings and tails. It stays compact and does not flare and is relatively hard to stabilize on the hook because it is slippery. Hollow hair is typically body hair and is used for wings or for spinning where you want it to flare. It is used for tails as well, but there you want to control the flare by thread technique. If you look at the typical hollow hair, i.e. deer, elk, caribou, antelope, it looks like a carrot, thick tapering to thin, with the thick part being hollow and the thinner part getting less hollow until it is actually solid at the tip. It is actually honeycomb hollow if you look at it under a microscope.”

This will be my last official Art Fair for the Summer; 2 days on the banks of the beautiful St. Croix River

BOOTH 39

Lakefront Park, Hudson, WI
September 22nd – 23rd, 2012

September 22, 10:00 – 5:00
September 23, 11:00 – 4:00

Over 65 juried artists will gather in Hudson’s Lakefront Park for this two-day community event. The Artist Village will be open both days with some of the top artists from the region showcasing their work. Acoustic musicians will add to the atmosphere of fine art and food along with a marketplace of business vendors.